Silver Storm: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 2 (23 page)

Friday, 4:56 a.m.

Sarah stared out the window of black sedan and let Tim drive her through the darkened city streets. He left her to her thoughts now, simply held her hand. He was there. Live or die, he was with her, and that was more than she had a right to ask for.

But she’d take it anyway. He’d pulled her back from the brink before, when she’d been chasing the young girl’s energy through the storm. But since they’d made love at Molly’s house her energy patterns had changed. She didn’t constantly buzz with painful trickles of power. She floated in it like a baby in a warm bath. Somehow, Tim pulled the pain away, organized the energy and let her access it when she wanted to, instead of having the universe shoving barbed wire down her throat.

They’d discussed the possible options with Katie before leaving the house. Katie agreed with her that she needed to be out in the open, preferably next to the water where she’d have access to the city’s power grid on one side and the total kinetic energy of Lake Michigan and the windy turmoil of air currents on the other. Tim suggested they go back to the rooftop of the Hancock Observatory, that way both the city’s electrical supply and the natural elements would be accessible. She’d have access to massive amounts of power if she needed it, or knew what the hell to do with it. That was the rub, she still had no idea what this attack was going to be like or how to fight it.

Tim had poured over Luke’s flash drive for hours looking for information. There was a bunch of theoretical physics and quantum theory there. Math. Like she could do equations as she battled the attack she knew was coming. But he’d sorted through it with his analytical mind, furious that someone had managed to salvage his initial ideas and theories and twist them into ideas for a weapon of mass destruction. But at least he had a few working theories.

The first was a frontal attack with some kind of fire molecule, something actually burning. She was pretty sure she could handle that.

The second theory was a redirected solar flare. If these aliens had somehow managed to collect the energy from solar flares and direct it at Chicago, that might be a bit more of a challenge.

The third idea was some kind of magnetic weapon that created super-particles that would react with and incinerate anything they came into contact with.

That one scared the shit out of her, so she figured that would be the lucky winner.

And what about the young girl’s strange energy? She could still feel it, had pulled Katie and Molly into a psychic link, and even they had recognized the resonating hum in their souls. This girl was not a Timewalker. She was something else, something more than that.

And she was here, somewhere. Young, vulnerable, and would most likely die if Sarah couldn’t take care of these bastards today.

Yeah, no pressure.

“Hey, how you holding up? You okay?” Tim pulled her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingertips, then the back of her hand as he parked the car. They had about ten minutes until dawn.

She studied the outline of his stubborn jaw, his firm mouth and regal nose, the intelligent predatory gleam in his eyes as they focused exclusively on her in what could be their final minutes together.

Timewalkers had failed in the past. The black plague, the holocaust and both world wars. Epic failures. Millions of dead.

Just because she had the Mark didn’t mean she was going to win. Sometimes, the good guys lost.

Tim’s features narrowed and he pulled her across the seat until they were nose to nose, sharing breath. Sharing life.

“I love you, Timothy Daniel Tucker.” She leaned forward and brushed a chaste kiss on his lips. It tasted of her tears.

“I love you, Sarah.” He kissed her quickly, a brief punishing kiss. “You annihilate this thing and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Sarah nodded, kissed his cheek, and tried to pull away, but he stopped her. Confused, she waited for him to say whatever seemed to be caught in his throat.

“Sarah, promise me you’ll fight for me, for us. Promise me you’ll come back to me.”

The grim set of his mouth and the sadness in his gaze made her want to weep. “I promise I’ll fight with everything I’ve got.”

“We win together or we die together, Sarah.” The truth of that statement crippled her tongue. There was no room for argument in his emotions or his tone. “Where you go, I go.”

Unable to speak past the lump in her chest, she nodded and placed her hand over his Mark to enjoy one last moment of warm comfort before she entered hell on Earth.

The hair on the back of her neck rose and she felt like ice cubes were being rubbed over every inch of her skin. The enemy had arrived. “It’s time.”

She yanked away from him and got out of the car to face the rising wind currents coming off the water, racing through the city streets like cold snakes seeking prey.

They raced for the doorway to the Hancock Observatory, and she blasted past the locks and into the elevator with Tim hot on her heels. The elevator ride seemed to take hours, but only a few minutes passed before she ran for the rooftop, bursting onto the top of the tower as a roiling cloud of orange-and-red light rumbled across the water toward the city. The cloud hid the alien ship, she was sure of it. The attack would come from there.

“Tim!” She glanced over her shoulder, searching for him. He was right behind her, less than a foot away. “You’re here.”

“Always.”

She smiled at him, every ounce of love she had for him bursting through her cells like Champagne bubbles. He smiled back and settled his hands on her hips, taking up position behind her. “You go take out that fucking thing. Kill it. I’ve got you and I’m never letting go.”

Turning, she raised her arms to the sky and opened herself to the flow of energy around the city. Pressure built inside her body as the alien ship’s power built a charge in the sky above them, pushing at her with an invisible fist until she couldn’t move enough to draw breath. She felt like a soda bottle, shaken, waiting for that one little tap to explode her into a million foaming bubbles.

She leaned her head back to rest on Tim’s shoulder and focused her gaze to the northern sky where the mass of brilliant lights gained speed and momentum in the clouds.

She contemplated shooting out at it like a missile, but instead left her frail human form in Tim’s care and floated up into the air. She allowed her will, her conscious power, to expand beneath the cloud formation and tried to form a giant safety net for the city.

She could feel it now, the narrow energy band the alien ship operated within. It felt slightly off, somehow out of synch with this reality. Disharmonious, like a C sharp that didn’t belong in the middle of a song.

That discordant note shimmered in the air all around her, coming from the cloud. There was no distinct mass she could attack, no ship she could detect, just a giant sense of wrongness that grated on every nerve she had like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Then it simply stopped and an eerie silence took its place, a silence no one else would be able to hear. It was as if all the energy around them had been sucked into an invisible black hole, like there was nothing left to notice, like the sky, the wind, the clouds no longer existed at all.

Like she was out of time.

She was outside of the time stream…

Sarah nearly lost herself in the pull of that nothingness, the void in reality that opened up above her. Only Tim’s presence kept her sane, let her know she existed in this empty place.

It could have been seconds or centuries before the cold nothingness expanded like a percussion blast from a nuclear weapon and the whole world went black. There was nothing but a few pinpoints of light, like tiny pieces of glitter stuck in a sea of black tar. A few hundred tiny specks flickered with light in her awareness and she clung to the sensation of Tim’s hands on her hips, his heat at her back. She couldn’t feel them, not really, but she knew they were there.

That knowing kept her calm as the energy wave raced over her now, a malignant consciousness stopped to inspect her, then moved on to the next tiny sparkle of light, and the next. She looked down to where her heart would have been and discovered that one of the flickering lights, one of the brightest lights in this strange timeless darkness, belonged to her soul.

Her attention snapped up and she followed the creature, the evil ooze that had touched her. It raced from light to light, like a snake waiting to devour the waiting souls whole.

The alien life force moved faster than her mind could track, searching for something. Or someone…

She felt herself smile and looked down again, the young girl’s energy pattern was still safely hidden within her own, a soul wrapped in a soul, shielded and protected from detection. Her ruse, her near loss of life, had worked.

The knowledge filled her with satisfaction and she reinforced the web of light and lies she had woven around the young girl’s soul, offering further protection.

The light fought to be free, to shine beside hers and she realized that hundreds of tiny threads were weaving and crawling toward her, making their way through this nowhere space, instinctively reacting to her presence. They were all linked together…and leading the serpentine coldness straight to her vulnerable soul.

And the aliens wanted her dead.

Chapter Thirteen

Friday, 5:17 a.m.

Sarah wrapped her energy around the girl and pulled on the life threads of every Timewalker descendant on Earth. They were the lights in the darkness. There were hundreds, all linked to potential power. She crushed the girl’s energy into a tiny light and surrounded it with the mass of energy she pulled from the other Walkers until the monsters that stalked them all became confused and withdrew completely, leaving this strange place behind like its twisted shadow.

Too late she realized her mistake. If it couldn’t kill the girl here, in the energy fields, it would eliminate her frail human body, annihilate the human girl they hunted on Earth. They’d destroy Chicago, take it to bare ground to ensure the girl’s physical body could not survive.

They’d kill her here, or Chicago would end.

She lost either way. If she left the girl here alone, linked to the other Timewalker descendants like a homing beacon, the alien consciousness would crush her. If she pulled away to fight the physical attack on Chicago, the girl’s energy would be vulnerable to attack here.

Chicken or egg.

Body or soul.

Dead or dead.

She covered the girl’s energy the best she could and raced back to her waiting body, to Tim on the rooftop and a glorious fall of silvery ash that appeared out of thin air and floated down toward the city. Maybe she could do both…

She’d do it or die trying.

Burying the girl’s soul inside her own now, linked to all the others, pulled the energy fabric of the Earth plane into a strange pretzel that would be absolutely impossible to hide for long from the cold consciousness hunting her.

The explosion she’d felt in the energy field was absent here on Earth. Instead of chaos and aftershocks knocking her off her feet, she felt nothing but an odd and peaceful silence as the glittering mass of silver flakes floated down like a light dusting of snow. It was infinitely more beautiful and more deadly than any snowstorm could be.

Sarah reached for them with her mind, trying to feel them, to neutralize them and drain them of their power.

They parted before her, pushed away by a magnetic force of opposites. She was of this world, they were other. Their energy spun backward, away from her, impossible for her to touch or control.

She had listened to Tim explain what he knew about magnetics and theoretical physics. They’d been right and wrong. These particles would not burn Chicago to the ground, not with fire or explosions, but with millions of tiny annihilations as they collided with the matter of
this
world, the energy of this world,
this
reality’s electron particles spun in the opposite direction of those in the tiny attacking particles of light.

The opposite of light was not dark, it was light that existed in the opposite direction. These aliens were crossing boundaries never meant to be crossed, twisting existence itself into a warped backward world. Dark and light can’t occupy the same space. Up can’t be down. Reality and non-reality literally can’t coexist in the same space.

Pull them back into the void, Sarah
.

Tim’s suggestion flooded her mind with confidence and she realized he’d been with her all along. His confident voice filled her left ear as they stared at the mass together.
It came from that place. Its energy signature will be drawn back to it if we can just open the door for it to go home
.

The cold nothingness wouldn’t explode or burn. There was no time, no life, no buildings, people, or earth for it to burn. It wasn’t conscious. It had no life force or intelligence of its own. The glittering power of the silver storm was magnetic and growing at an exponential rate as every molecule it bumped into changed its energy pattern to match the storm. She could feel each collision costing the particles power, but they wouldn’t die soon enough. They’d grow in numbers until they destroyed Chicago, and probably three to four feet of earth beneath the city, before they lost enough charge to be neutralized out of existence.